Features

Beijing's "Mr Big" Airport

1 Mar 2008 by business traveller

Beijing Capital International Terminal 3 is surpassing the critics' expectations with its extremely high standards, reports Paul Mooney.

With the opening of Beijing’s high-tech Terminal 3 on February 29, the city finally has an airport that matches China’s impressive economic growth, and which some experts are describing as one of the most impressive facilities in the world.

The new terminal comes on line as Beijing’s overcrowded Terminal 2 – already obsolete by the time it opened in 1999 – is struggling to keep up with record numbers of travellers and aircraft. With the number of flights in and out of the airport reaching the maximum permitted by the end of 2007, aviation authorities cancelled a number of flights until the new terminal went into operation.

Keen to make a good first impression when visitors arrive in August for the summer Olympics, Chinese officials pulled out all the stops in building the terminal, which has been equipped with state-of-the-art hardware. The project, estimated to cost as much as US$4 billion (airport officials refuse to disclose the amount spent on the project), is a joint venture between Foster + Partners, the designers of Chek Lap Kok International Airport in Hongkong, Arup, an international engineering firm, and NACO, a Dutch airport planning firm. “There was a genuine desire by the client that the latest technology be built into the system,” says Brian Timmoney, chief representative for Foster + Partners in Beijing.

The Chinese like numbers and words like “big”, and this new airport offers an excellent chance to rattle off strings of statistics and adjectives. The new Terminal 3, which covers some 1 million square metres, is the world’s biggest, with a combined surface area larger than all five of Heathrow’s terminals, and twice as large as Chek Lap Kok. It also has a 3,800-metre long by 60-metre wide runway to accommodate the Airbus A380.

Terminal 3 had to be big to handle the record numbers of passengers expected to arrive in this Olympic year, when some two million visitors are expected to descend on the city. And there’s no indication that the passenger numbers will tail off after this important year. Beijing expects to be handling an annual 50 million passengers by 2020.

A satellite building in the middle of the domestic and international wings, which provides an additional eight gates, will go into operation in early 2009, years ahead of the original plan.

The huge size of the project and the rising number of travellers made it important for planners to create a user-friendly and efficient airport, with good transportation, minimum walking required, convenient transfers and few level shifts.

Here are the highlights:


Easy connections

Terminal 3, a complex of three buildings designed with the help of a feng shui master, has matching domestic and international terminals at each end. The curved, triangular aircraft areas efficiently allow for a maximum number of planes to be parked close to each other, further reducing the amount of walking that passengers need to do.


Clear direction

The geometry of the structure was designed to direct the flow of passengers, almost hypnotically, in what Timmoney refers to as a “clarity of direction”.

The sweeping shape of the arrival hall, which looks like a 17th-century structure, reinforces the movement. The building seems to be drawing people in, whether they are arriving by car or train. “There’s a very positive feeling going through the building,” says Timmoney. “The vast architectural spaces are monumental.”

The lights in the roof stretch due north across the north-south axis of the building, serving as a sort of compass, changing to some 16 shades along the way, and also keeping passengers moving in the right direction. The movement in the building is always downward, so that passengers won’t get confused by having to move up and down on different levels.


Bright arrivals

Travellers arriving at the airport come in on the upper level under the sky-lit roof, the opposite of other airports where visitors normally enter on the lower, dark level. “The arrival is fantastic because you get the full experience of the whole architecture of the building and you are in an environment that is completely open,” says Timmoney, adding that at no time are arriving passengers in an underground or dark corridor.

Transportation is state-of-the-art. The internal Automatic People Mover, designed by Bombardier, covers the two-kilometre space between the north and south terminals in just two minutes, moving at a rate of 80km per hour.


Traveller’s dream

Access to the airport is a major improvement over the old terminal, which opened in 1999, and which was a traveller’s nightmare, with cars parked three and four rows abreast of each other at the departure terminal, and many passengers forced to drag their bags across a broken walkway and to cross a street with incoming traffic.


Seamless access

Terminal 3 has 54 bays that can accommodate 2,436 taxis per peak hour, 31 pick-up bays for buses and 69 for private cars. There is also space for short-term parking for more than 7,000 cars. And there is a new dedicated highway that connects to the terminal.

Even more exciting is that a high-speed light rail connection will whisk travellers along the 28km between the airport and the Dongzhimen station in less than 20 minutes, making four stops along the way. The light rail station is linked with Beijing’s subway system and so transportation is seamless. This means no more being stuck in traffic on the Airport Expressway or disputes with taxi drivers. As in Hongkong’s Chek Lap Kok Airport, passengers will be able to check in for their flights downtown and get rid of their bags before heading out to the airport.

The baggage handing system, designed by Siemens of Germany, is one of the most advanced systems in the world. The 330 check-in desks are connected to a 20-mile high-speed tub conveyor system that is controlled by intelligent IT and automation systems to speed up baggage handling that will whisk 20,000 bags per hour at a pace of 10 metres per second, more than twice the speed at Heathrow.

Right aesthetics

Great pains were also taken to get the aesthetics right. As the building is deep, 155 separate skylights were built into the roof facing southeast to bring sunlight and warmth into the building to keep it warm in the winter while minimising energy use. And the area of the roof area that is glazed has been kept low to reduce the need for air conditioning in the summer. Daylight enters all parts of the building through the roof. “Wherever you are in the airport, there is always this amazing awareness of the outside,” says Timmoney.


Welcome to China

The designers were asked to make the airport state-of-the-art, but at the same also evoke Chinese traditional culture. The terminal has a massive sloping gold-tiled roof, similar to the colour of the roof tiles at the Forbidden City, which was created to resemble the back of a dragon. The texture of the roof tiles is uneven to give them the look of a dragon’s scales. The structure is graced by large red columns reminiscent of imperial architecture.


Improved retail

There will also be a wider variety of retail outlets. While dining venues at the international departure terminal at the old airport were severely limited to mediocre Chinese restaurants that offered up pizza for breakfast and US$6 cups of coffee, and one crowded Starbucks, Terminal 3 will have a bigger variety of dining facilities offering Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese and Southeast Asian cuisines, as well as fast food outlets McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and Pizza Hut.

“There will be a major change in retail,” says Timmoney. “It will be like Hongkong, but there will be more of it.”


Plugged to the max

Passengers will be able to access wireless internet throughout the terminal. The system also makes it possible for airlines to increase mobile check-in service at peak times. At the same time, restaurants and vendors can adopt wireless ordering and wireless sales services. At present, wireless internet access is only available in the business centres of Terminals 1 and 2.

While most airports evolve over a period of time – Heathrow was 50 years in the making – this one was completed in just four years, making it the biggest and fastest airport expansion ever attempted.

A peak labour force of more than 50,000 built the terminal, working 24 hours a day in shifts, pouring some two million cubic metres of concrete, and using half a million tonnes of steel, or ten tonnes per worker.

“The Chinese have built the biggest airport in the world in the fastest time,” says Timmoney, “and it has been built to high standards, surpassing everyone’s expectations.”


WHERE TO STAY

Travellers in need of an early morning exit from Beijing will now be able to stay close to the airport with the launch of Langham Place, the first five-star hotel to open at the Beijing Capital Airport. The hotel, which has 371 guestrooms and suites, is located adjacent to the newly constructed high-tech Terminal 3, and just minutes from the also new China International Exhibition Center and Tianzhu Airport Industrial Zone, making it convenient for business travellers, trade fair participants and event organisers.

The design is a combination of modern decor coupled with a contemporary art gallery and the latest in-room technology. Langham Place has flexible meeting and banquet space covering 5,500sqm and a 2,000-square-metre Beijing Exhibition Center. The hotel also has five restaurants and bars, the Chuan Spa, which is based on Traditional Chinese Medicine, a health club and a 25-metre lap pool.

Known for its swanky hotels in London, Melbourne, Boston and Hongkong, the new airport hotel is the latest venture in the company’s long march to expand around China. Langham will open its first boutique hotel in Shanghai in mid-2008, with three other additions scheduled to open soon in China – two in Beijing (2008) and one in Changchun (2009).


BEIJING CAPITAL IN NUMBERS

•    11 check-in islands
•    330 check-in desks
•    15 baggage-reclaim units
•    10 minutes from aircraft to carousels
•    7,300 short-term parking spaces
•    Aircraft movements – 500,000/year in 2020
•    Passenger movements – 50 million/year in 2020
•    T3 total land area – 1 million square metres
•     T3 length – 3.25km
•     T3 width – 785m from tip to top of concourse
•    Aircraft stands – 101
•    Peak hour figures – 7,000 pax/hour
•    Peak workforce – 5,000

Loading comments...

Search Flight

See a whole year of Reward Seat Availability on one page at SeatSpy.com

Business Traveller March 2024 edition
Business Traveller March 2024 edition
Be up-to-date
Magazine Subscription
To see our latest subscription offers for Business Traveller editions worldwide, click on the Subscribe & Save link below
Polls